Most of the people I’ve met think that being at work a lot of hours means more productivity. I mean in IT, in software development. For some reason they believe that the more hours you sit in front of the computer the better. I find this absolutely wrong, anti-productive 100%. Even when I was addressing my own company it was a mistake to work more than 6 hours a day because I don’t think the human beings are made to do the same activity that long.
If you think of something you like to do, whatever it be, you’ll most likely agree with me that you would not like to do so for more than 4 hours. I love software development and I like to write code every day but, honestly, I don’t feel like working more than 5 hours a day, no matter how exciting the project is. When I have only a few hours to solve a problem I focus on it much more than when I have to be in the office late hours. When I start the day in the office having rested properly, having a tight deadline for the items in my to-do list I’m definitively more productive and design the software better.
When I was in colleague I used to focus much more as the exams were getting closer and I did pass the colleague successfully understanding almost everything and remembering only the important things.
The ideal for me is to work 28 hours a week, investing some of that time researching and other activities (will post about that someday). I hope companies realize that in the future to have more happy and efficient developers, focusing on the quality and not in the quantity (usually the quantity of wasted time)
